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Google’s Chrome OS to soon get dictation as an accessibility feature

Americas, Assistive Technology, News, November 27 2017

Google’s Chrome OS will soon get support for dictation as an accessibility feature. Currently the only way you can enable this is through extensions. Google Docs supports this feature on all platforms including Chrome OS. On Chromebooks with Google Play Store support, there could be some Android apps as well. However, with this new feature, dictation will become a built-in feature for Chrome OS.

A code change request which indicates that Google’s web-based operating system will soon get support for system-level dictation. System-level dictation will be brought to Chrome OS as an accessibility feature. The commit change request has the following description:

Chrome Story notes that the bug mentioned in this change request is private, so at this point, more details like screenshots are not available. The commit’s description states that dictation will come with a keyboard shortcut.

When this feature is live, users will be able to launch dictation using the keyboard shortcut CTRL + ALT + S. This will most probably require enabling the feature under accessibility settings.

The change request on the Chromium Gerrit hasn’t been merged yet. Therefore, it will take a while to merge the request, add it to the Chrome OS developer channel, then add it as an optional flag, and then finally enable it for all users. So even though users have to wait a lot for the feature as of yet, they can be assured that the feature is expected to eventually make its way to the stable channel of Chrome OS.

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